Thursday, January 14, 2016

Food for Thought

It’s easy to read the headlines and see footage on weather disasters, most of which have some strong linkage to dramatic climate change issue. With a particularly powerful boost from a strongEl Niño beginning in early January, we have tons of images of floods, particularly up and down the Mississippi River basin. Homes and businesses lost. Tornados and fierce winds making it worse. Powerful images. The California drought is still big news despite the newfound rain.

But behind the headlines are the little stories lost on the back pages of printed, televised and Web-based news… little stories with a big and rather immediate impact on our wallets. In an open letter published in Nature.com (January 6th) – entitledInfluence of extreme weather disasters on global crop production(by Corey Lesk, Pedram Rowhani and Navin Ramankutty) – the authors analyzed the underlying data on food production as impacted by the recent mega-changes in weather realities all over the world.

The numbers aren’t good. There will be more starving people in the near term and food prices are simply going to rise far faster than any other part of the commodity markets. And while floods create short term displacements in crop production, the more serious crop impairments come from the other end of the weather spectrum: increasingly hot, dry conditions.

“‘People already knew that these extreme weather events had impacts on crop production,’ said Navin Ramankutty, a geographer from the University of British Columbia and an author of the report. ‘But we didn’t know by how much, and we didn’t have a basis for how that might change in the future.’

“They found that droughts cut a country’s crop production by 10 percent, and heat waves by 9 percent, but that floods and cold spells had no effects on agricultural production levels. His team estimated a loss of more than three billion tons of cereal production from 1964 to 2007 as a result of droughts and heat waves.

“‘We don’t think about it much, but rice, wheat and maize alone provide more than 50 percent of global calories,’ Dr. Ramankutty said. ‘When these grain baskets are hit, it results in food price shocks, which leads to increasing hunger…

“The team also found that the effects of droughts were more severe for crops produced in developed countries than in underdeveloped countries. Dry spells caused losses of nearly 20 percent in North America, Europe and the Australasia region, but only 12 percent in Asia and 9 percent in Africa. They found no significant effects from droughts in Latin America.

“One reason for the discrepancy, Dr. Rowhani said, is that developed nations tend to grow more uniform crops, which may be more vulnerable to drought, while underdeveloped countries grow diverse patches of plants that may have greater resilience.

“The team also found that droughts occurring since 1985 were more severe than earlier ones, causing average losses of about 14 percent compared with about 7 percent. They suggest that climate change may affect the frequency and severity of these events in the future.” New York Times, January 6th.

The bottom line: it’s the warming trend that is the real concern. With grains (rice, wheat and corn being the mainstays) providing about half the calories consumed by people all over the world, it is precisely these crops that are feeling the worst pinch. Our inability to contain greenhouse gasses at any level remotely necessary to reverse these global weather catastrophes will continue to hit those at the bottom rungs of the global economy far worse than those on top. For many of them, it is a question of life or death. But since grain is the driver of food prices (think about grain as the livestock/poultry/dairy cow feed source and go from there), we are all going to be slammed with higher food prices as well.

My big question remains, since the real, hard dollar cost of global warming is heading for the trillions and trillions of dollars level, from loss of homes, livelihoods, land mass, disease and insect infestation to decreased crop yields and political instability, not to mention the rather dramatic increase in mortality statistics, why do American political candidates believe that they can ignore these costs and look solely to the “growth” statistics of businesses in the U.S. to measure success?

We are all going to pay hard dollars for those costs. Taxes, the federal deficit, higher food prices, personal losses, higher insurance premiums, etc., etc. will cost us rather directly. What business can continue to thrive by ignoring losses, eliminating negative numbers from their balance sheets and income statements, and only looking at the positive numbers? It’s time to live in the real world, understand the real costs and deal with facts as they are… not as lying politicians tell you they are.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while the new reality is scary, if we don’t make some big changes in the way we live and consume, our future will be even scarier.

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Peter's Bio

Peter J. Dekom practices law in Los Angeles and was formerly "of counsel" with Weissmann Wolff Bergman Coleman Grodin & Evall and a partner in the firm of Bloom, Dekom, Hergott and Cook. Mr. Dekom's clients include or have included such Hollywood notables as George Lucas, Paul Haggis, Keenen Ivory Wayans, John Travolta, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Andy Davis, Robert Towne and Larry Gordon among many others, as well as corporate clients such as Sears, Roebuck and Co., Pacific Telesis and Japan Victor Corporation (JVC). He has been listed in Forbes among the top 100 lawyers in the United States and in Premiere Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Hollywood .

Mr. Dekom has been a management/marketing consultant, and entrepreneur in the fields of entertainment, Internet, and telecommunications. As a consultant to the state of New Mexico for almost a decade, he was instrumental in creating, writing and implementing legislation to encourage film and television production in the state and supervised the film loan program portion of that incentive structure until the spring of 2011. Mr. Dekom has also provided off-balance sheet, insurance-backed financing for major motion picture studios.

Mr. Dekom served on the board of directors of Imagine Films Entertainment while the company remained publicly traded and was a board member of Will Vinton Studios and Cinebase Software, among others, leaving upon change of ownership. He has also served as a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and Academy Foundation, Board of Directors, Chairman (now Emeritus) of the American Cinematheque, and on the Advisory Board of the Shanghai International Film Festival. He recently served on the Board of Governors for the America Bar Assn.’s Sports and Entertainment Law Section, where he often authored articles, delivered lectures and continues to be an active participant.

The Beverly Hills Bar Association honored Mr. Dekom as Entertainment Lawyer of the Year in 1994, the Century City Bar Association accorded him the same honor in 2004, and the Family Assistance Program named him Man of the Year in 1992 for his work with the homeless. In 2012, the American Bar Association, through its Forum on Sports and Entertainment Law, honored Mr. Dekom with its highest recognition for entertainment lawyers, the Ed Rubin Service Award. Author of dozens of scholarly articles, Mr. Dekom also is the co-author of Not on My Watch; Hollywood vs. the Future (New Millennium Publishing, 2003) with Peter Sealey and author of Next: Reinventing Media, Marketing and Entertainment (HekaRose Publishing Group 2014). He has served as an adjunct professor in the UCLA Film School, a lecturer (entertainment marketing) at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business as well as being a featured speaker at film festivals, corporations, universities and bar associations all over the world.

Mr. Dekom graduated from Yale in 1968 (BA), and graduated first in his class in 1973 from the UCLA School of Law (JD). He is married to Kelley Choate, an MBA and former art gallery-owner who evolved into a renowned micro-collage artist in her own right. He also has a son, Christopher (b. 1983), who is a Duke University graduate, a Chartered Financial Analyst, a 2013 Darden (UVa) MBA graduate, and is currently an executive with a Los Angeles-based media and entertainment company. Chris' wife, Stephanie (a 2013 George Washington University MD grad), is a neonatal pediatrics 'fellow' at a major Los Angeles hospital